EditorialsBy Matt Bud, Chairman, The FENG

From time to time I get inquiries about the services of career consulting firms. (Please understand I am not talking about recognized and well respected outplacement firms such as Right Management and Lee Hecht Harrison, nor am I talking about a few individual Career Coaches who are known to me and to your fellow members.) For those of us over the age of 40 (and that’s just about everyone in The FENG), the specter of potential unemployment or under employment from now until the end of time can be a scary one. I understand and accept that. In addition, job search for those of us over 40 is more difficult. Not only are we over qualified for just about everything, [ Read more… ]

Every once in a while I get a note from one of our members about folks who are promising to find him/her a job by waving their magic wand. I can almost see these so called miracle workers crawling out from under the rocks they call home. You would think that exposure to sunlight would kill them, but like cockroaches, nothing seems to permanently destroy them. Personally, I find it reprehensible that there are organizations in the world who try to sell lifejackets to people who are drowning, especially when the lifejackets don’t even work. If you don’t believe me that (almost) all of them are a bunch of thieves, I would invite you to Google the names of their [ Read more… ]

I saw an article several years ago that went on at length about the dissatisfaction folks had with outplacement firms. While I’m not a big fan of everything outplacement firms teach, it is vitally important that anyone who wants to work until THEY want to stop learn about this whole job search thing. It’s not that outplacement firms do a bad job, it is more that they don’t exist to find you a job, because they CAN’T. No one can find you a job except you. All that anyone can do for you, if you are a job seeker, is help educate you on the process. In part, I think the reason people over value job leads is that they [ Read more… ]

Ah, if only there were such a thing when it came to job search. Alas, there isn’t. From time to time I get emails asking about the various “blood suckers,” who claim to provide variations on outplacement. They profess to be able to do either mass mailings, mass emailings or the ability to teach you how to leap over tall buildings in a single bound. (Yes, even at your age. But, I think they catapult you. You don’t actually leap.) Whatever happened to “If it’s too good to be true, it probably isn’t?” Have all of you hard nosed and hard headed finance types softened up a bit on me? Please leave your wallet at home if you decide to [ Read more… ]

From time to time I get inquiries about the services of career consulting firms. (Please understand I am not talking about recognized and well respected outplacement firms such as Right Management and Lee Hecht Harrison, nor am I talking about a few individual Career Coaches who are known to me and to your fellow members.) For those of us over the age of 40 (and that’s just about everyone in The FENG), the specter of potential unemployment or under employment from now until the end of time can be a scary one. I understand and accept that. In addition, job search for those of us over 40 is more difficult. Not only are we over qualified for just about everything, [ Read more… ]

If there is one thing that is certain about us financial types it is that we always know the answer. Ask us a question and it isn’t long before we are well into the “primarily due to’s and partially offset by’s.” Yet, this major strength of ours and important skill set is an impediment to success at job search. Our perception of the world, much like other human beings, is colored by our experiences, and in our world job change typically hasn’t happened as frequently as it has for many other categories of workers. When I was in my mid-40’s, an art director friend of mine told me that he had already worked at 25 different advertising agencies, some of [ Read more… ]

In last night’s newsletter there was a job posting from a search firm requesting applications for a Vice President of Finance for a publicly traded healthcare organization. One of our members who responded to this posting received a boilerplate letter back indicating that while he wasn’t a fit for this job, the recruiter was willing to take him on as a client and market him to companies that would value his “exceptional qualifications.” If you received a letter of this nature, I would hope that your well-developed “BS detector” would already be going off. The offering included: Career Planning, Resume Writing, Interviewing Skills Development, Developing 50+ Target Companies, Submitting Online Applications, Candidate Sales & Marketing Campaign, Negotiating Compensation and finally, [ Read more… ]